SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty
Living Translation

Living Translation performs the invaluable service of gathering for the first time Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s wide-ranging writings on translation. In this volume, we can see in sharp relief the extent to which, throughout her long career, she has made translation a central concern of the comparative humanities.

Starting with her landmark “Translator’s Preface” to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her “Foreword” to Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” and “Afterword” to Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow, Spivak tackled translatability as such from the ground up and at the political limit; at border checkpoints, at sites of colonial pedagogy, in acts of resistance to monolingual regimes of national language, at the borders of minor literature and schizo-analysis, in the deficits of cultural debt and linguistic expropriation, and, more generally, at theory’s edge, which is to say, where practical criticism yields to theorizing in Untranslatables. This volume also addresses how Spivak’s institution-building as director of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa—and in her subsequent places of employment—began at the same time.

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Published by Seagull Books, 2022
Literature / Postcolonial Studies / Essays